The skin broke more easily than I expected.
Juice flooded over my tongue instantly, sweet at first, richer than anything I had ever tasted, almost painfully rich, like honey and summer heat and something sharper beneath it that I couldn't place. Then came the second taste. Bitter. Metallic. Strange.
The warmth inside it spread through my mouth and throat before I had even swallowed the first bite.
I frowned.
"That's—"
Pain hit.
Not after I finished swallowing.
Not gradually.
Immediately.
It tore through my chest and stomach like I had swallowed a live coal that split into ten and then a hundred. I doubled forward so fast the rest of the fruit dropped from my hand onto the floorboards. Heat surged down my throat, into my ribs, into my belly, spreading with brutal speed through every channel in my body like fire looking for places too narrow to hold it.
I choked.
Another wave followed.
Then another.
I slid off the bed and hit the floor on one knee, clutching at my chest as if pressure from outside could do anything about what was happening inside.
"Finn—"
"Finish it."
I stared at the fallen fruit in disbelief.
"What?"
"Finish it."
I made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan.
"You're insane—"
"If you stop now, you may waste it. Eat it."
I hated him.
I hated that he was probably right more.
With shaking fingers I grabbed the fruit from the floor and forced down the rest of it in desperate, ragged bites.
The second half was worse.
The heat became violence.
It slammed outward through my body in pulses, each one stronger than the last. My vision flashed white. Every place I had ever felt spirit power before, small, cold, hidden, now felt ripped open and flooded. It was not like drinking energy. It was like being forced wider from the inside.
I fell fully to the floor.
The world narrowed to wood planks beneath my cheek and agony beneath my skin.
It started in my chest.
No, not started. Centered there. Like something buried under my ribs had been seized by invisible hands and was now being stretched, deepened, widened beyond anything it had ever been. My breath came in broken jerks. Sweat burst across my whole body. My hands dug into the floorboards hard enough that splinters drove into my palm.
"Make it stop," I gasped.
"No."
I would have cursed him if I'd had enough air.
The heat changed.
Not hotter.
Deeper.
It moved outward through my limbs, down my spine, up my neck, along my arms, into my fingertips. My spirit well—cold, hollow, narrow until now—suddenly became all I could feel. Not as an idea. As a place. A real interior depth being torn open and hammered larger while something dense and bright poured into it.
I screamed into the floorboards.
Downstairs, someone shouted something muffled through the ceiling. I barely heard it.
"Breathe," Finn said.
"Easy for you."
"Breathe anyway."
I dragged air in through my teeth. Lost it immediately when another pulse hit.
Time stopped making sense.
At some point I rolled onto my back. At some point I think I kicked the chair over. At some point my shoulder slammed into the bedframe hard enough to bruise. None of it mattered. All of it was smaller than the pain.
Images flickered through me too, though whether they were caused by the fruit or by my body trying to protect itself from what it was feeling, I couldn't tell.
Silver bark.
Dark roots in stone.
Golden light trapped behind red skin.
The cave.
The dragon's breathing.
Finn's presence beside my soul, sharper now, clearer, like the fruit was not just opening me but linking him more deeply into what I could sense.
"Why does it hurt this much?" I rasped.
"Because growth is easy to desire and difficult to survive."
"Shut up."
The heat became pressure.
The pressure became expansion.
My spirit well, my hollow, narrow, pathetic reservoir, was no longer narrow. It wasn't stable yet. Wasn't refined. But I could feel the shape of it changing. Deepening. Broadening. More room. More capacity. More weight sitting behind it, real and cold and waiting to be used.
That realization hit right before everything went black.
Not darkness like sleep.
Darkness like the body cutting the cord on its own awareness because pain had exceeded usefulness.
I was gone for some length of time I could not measure.
When I woke, I was on the floor beside the bed with dried sweat on my skin and a stiffness in every muscle that made me feel twice my age.
For one terrible second, I thought the pain had returned.
Then I realized the opposite was true.
The agony was gone.
Not completely without residue. My body still ached in a deep, total way. But the tearing, widening, white-hot violence had ended.
I stared at the ceiling and breathed.
Slowly.
Carefully.
My clothes clung damply to me. The room smelled like sweat, stale inn air, and the faint metallic tang of spirit power after use, at least that was what I thought it was. Hard to tell. Everything in me felt subtly different.
I pushed myself upright.
This time the motion was easier.
Not painless. But easier.
I sat there on the floor for a moment and turned my attention inward.
The well answered at once.
Cold depth.
Weight.
Space.
So much more space than before.
I actually stopped breathing for half a second.
It was bigger.
No question.
Wider and deeper both, its boundaries no longer feeling like a cramped hollow but like a real reservoir. Not vast. Not by any sensible standard. But real. Full enough that just sensing it made something fierce and hungry in me go still in satisfaction.
"I can feel it," I whispered.
"Yes," Finn said.
"It's… bigger."
"Astute observation."
I ignored that. My focus remained inward.
Before, touching spirit power had felt like drawing a little cold thread up from somewhere hidden and fragile. Now the source of it felt steadier. Denser. The current I could sense moving from it into the rest of me was broader, easier to notice, less like grasping at smoke and more like standing near deep water.
I looked down at my hands.
Then curled them slowly into fists.
"How much stronger?"
There was a pause.
"Your well has deepened and widened. Your reservoir is much larger than before. Against beginner-class fighters or monsters, that matters."
"Only beginner class."
"You say that as though you were not nearly killed by less."
I clenched my jaw.
He continued anyway.
"In the scale of things, you are still weak. Beginner class is the lowest rung for both monsters and humans. Do not let one fruit convince you that you have climbed far."
That cooled the brief flare of triumph without killing it completely.
Which, irritatingly, was probably the right balance.
I stood up slowly.
My legs held.
Better than before.
My body still felt sore and battered and not remotely fresh, but the exhaustion beneath it had changed. Less hollow. Less depleted. There was something steadier in me now. Not strength in the simple sense. Capacity.
Potential.
I picked up the chair and righted it.
Then I sat on the bed again and just breathed for a while.
No monsters.
No cave.
No river.
Just a room in a small town and the knowledge that I had stolen power from a dragon and forced it into myself and survived that too.
Eventually I stood, splashed some water from the washstand over my face, and left the room.
The inn's main room was quieter now than before. A few people had changed places. The bearded innkeeper looked up when I came down the stairs and gave me a longer stare than before.
"Well," he said, "you still look like shit. But less like you're about to die on my floor."
"Good to know."
I crossed to the counter. "I need directions."
"That so!?"
"To Sylarion."
That got a small shift out of him, not surprise exactly, but a recalculation.
He leaned one forearm on the counter. "Long way from here."
"Where is here?"
He named the town. It meant nothing to me.
My expression must have shown that, because one corner of his mouth moved.
"You took a bad wrong turn somewhere?"
"You could say that."
He gave me directions in the practical way people do when they assume you either know how roads work or deserve to be lost. Follow the eastern trade road out of town. Stay on it until the fork near the old watchtower. Keep south there, not north. Two more towns, then the border routes. Sylarion still a fair distance after that.
I asked how far.
He told me.
Too far, basically.
Not impossible. Just far enough that I felt the road open back up in my mind as a thing with weight again.
"Thanks," I said.
He grunted once.
I went back to my room, lay down fully clothed, and was asleep almost before the bed finished creaking under me.
When I woke again, daylight had shifted.
Morning this time.
My body still hurt, but less brutally than the day before. The fruit's changes remained. I could feel them immediately, like waking with a larger shadow inside myself. Not a miracle. Not mastery. Just more.
I gathered my things, took one last moment to feel the cold depth of my spirit well, then left the room.
Outside, the town looked much the same as it had the day before—quiet, functional, ordinary. Smoke from cook fires, wagon wheels, voices drifting from open windows. People beginning their day as if the world were not full of monsters and burning cities and dragons guarding impossible fruit.
For a second I stood in the street with the sword at my side and the road to Sylarion stretching out beyond the town.
Then I started walking.
The road out ran east.
Gravel and dirt packed by wagons, bordered in places by low grass and split-rail fences. The morning air felt cooler than the inn room had, cleaner too. My steps were steadier now. Not effortless. But steadier.
Finn was quiet at first.
"Do not mistake a beginning for arrival."
I kept my eyes on the road ahead. "I know."
"You are stronger than you were. That is all."
"Against beginner class!?"
"Yes."
I let that sit for a moment.
A week ago, that would have frustrated me. Maybe it still did. But now there was something else under it, something harder and more useful.
A sense of direction.
Not just the road.
My life.
Astralon was behind me. Nate was behind me. My parents were behind me. The lion was behind me too, though not gone. Never gone. Sylarion lay ahead, and with it training, power, and the next step toward becoming something the monsters would eventually have reason to fear.
I tightened my grip on the strap across my shoulder and kept walking.
I was not just running anymore.
I was heading somewhere.
And for the first time since leaving Astralon, that felt like more than survival.
It felt like purpose.